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The Goals

Aggregate and analyze digital campaign information across company divisions

Improve clickthrough rates and bounce rates

The Approach

See engagement metrics to compare media and campaign performance

Build audiences for each product to reach related customers

Use reporting to find potential audiences and moments to engage

The Results

30% improvement in return on ad spend

50% drop in bounce rate

300% higher clickthrough

A user-first approach to advertising

In 2015, electronics giant Panasonic, with 7.7 trillion JPY ($69 billion USD) in yearly sales and over 260,000 employees, shifted from a product-centric advertising strategy to a customer-centric one, and saw great success. That year, the company’s Consumer Marketing Japan Division used Google Analytics 360 to put to use key insights about its customers.

Since Panasonic Japan doesn’t sell products directly from its website, the primary aim of the consumer marketing division is to increase customer engagement via effective digital advertising. At the time, each Panasonic product had its own advertising campaign, and the company lacked a single platform to analyze and report on performance across campaigns. Panasonic Japan knew it would need a more precise platform in order to find the right audience and analyze the results in detail.

Creating one interface

The first step toward a customer-centric future for Panasonic Japan and NRI Netcom, a Google Marketing Platform Partner, was to measure all digital marketing campaigns on a single platform. They needed the ability to analyze accumulated performance metrics from their marketing campaigns across platforms and agencies. They chose Analytics 360 for the job. Its native integrations with Google Ads, Campaign Manager, Google Display & Video 360, and Google Search Ads 360 gave the team easy access to highly detailed metrics and insights from all channels.

The reports in Analytics 360 go beyond clicks and costs to look deep into on-site behavior metrics like bounce rates and average pages per session for both view-through and clickthrough activity. These metrics enabled Panasonic Japan to fully understand which keywords and display ads were driving real audience engagement with its website.

Creating a unified view in Analytics 360 meant Panasonic Japan was able to treat marketing information as a common corporate asset, managed by a team that spanned various divisions.

Reaching the right customers

With all their analytics in one place and new audience engagement insights in hand, Panasonic Japan and NRI Netcom began taking steps to improve their digital marketing performance. They started by building remarketing audiences in Analytics 360 for all of their main-line products.

Using segmentation features, they created different audiences based on people’s engagement with different products’ branding websites. And by using Google Ads and Display & Video 360, the team could better place ads based on the products users had researched. Panasonic Japan could also take advantage of what they knew about which products were often purchased together. For example, if a user is interested in TVs, then Panasonic Japan can also advertise complementary products like speakers.

The team then used the ad integrations to acquire new users likely to have high engagement levels. Analytics 360 is able to show specific engagement metrics like pages per session and session duration based on an array of interests and trends. Once Panasonic Japan understood its most engaged users, it could more successfully advertise to similar audiences. Finally, it is able to review terms that customers might be searching for and use the ad integrations in Analytics 360 to help audiences find the most relevant products.

Winning new audiences

Panasonic Japan’s audience-centric digital campaigns have been a success. Return on advertising spend (ROAS) improved by 30% and, for some campaigns, clickthrough rates increased by up to 300% year over year. At the same time, bounce rate on its website declined by 50%.

All these techniques now make it easy for Panasonic Japan to bring its customers more relevant ads for the products they want, as well as for products they may want in the future. With all its campaign performance details in one place, the company can quickly optimize campaigns to drive better performance.

Finally, by using a single interface, Panasonic Japan can quickly rearrange budgets between low-performing and high-performing ads. This type of dynamic allocation has saved the company 30% on its ad spend — money it can now use on new digital campaigns to reach more customers.